The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (25 page)

While Jasper did that, wrinkling his nose at the smell, Goose
Man stared down the narrow metal steps, rubbing his chin with his thumb and
sucking at his teeth. After a moment, he lifted the body and heaved the tangle
of limbs up and over, sending it straight to the pavement three stories below
where it struck headfirst with a sharp, wet crack.

Jasper stared after the body, its limbs contorted and bent, but
it simply lay there, silent as a rag doll. Just like the other body crumpled upon
the fire escape, a broken toy, eyes missing. “They ain’t in no pain,” he
observed.

Goose Man looked at him sharply, the different colored eyes
staring with bright intensity. For a moment, his hands wrung the metal of the
lightning rod, and in that moment, Jasper thought Goose Man looked absolutely
furious
.
The metal in the staff emitted a shrill, agonizing screech, and Jasper thought maybe
he shouldn’t have said anything at all. Maybe he should have kept his mouth
shut. Maybe …

Then the fury drained from the white wizard’s eyes. “They’re
dead, and death is without
feeling
,” Goose Man corrected. “No feeling at
all … for anything. There’s a difference.”

The second corpse went down to the alley the same way as the
first.

“Come on,” Goose Man said, marching down the steps, boots
ringing against the steel, staff knocking flatly, metal on metal. They went
down to where the two corpses lay sprawled in the darkness behind the apartment
building, Goose Man going immediately to the large Dumpster and lifting the
lid. “Bring them over here, and dump them inside.”

Jasper did as he was told, careful where he walked, the alley
littered with stones and bits of glass; he was still barefoot. He dragged the
bodies by their armpits—easier than carrying them—and maneuvered each one into
the Dumpster. The bodies were heavier than they looked, heavier than Goose Man
claimed. Pushing one out a window was one thing, but lifting it high enough to
clear the chest-high container was another matter entirely.

The work made him sweaty, and some of whatever made the
corpses stink was on him now.

Now he would probably stink, too.

*     *     *

“Fine work,” Kreiger said as Marco’s body sagged into the
piles of weak, underfilled garbage bags. He brought the lid down, careful not
to let it slam and wake up the entire block. A couple bodies fall to the
pavement, no one thinks twice, but slam garbage cans late at night, and some
busybody will invariably call the cops. And he couldn’t have that. Not yet,
anyway.

Besides, Ellen was asleep on the roof, and it wouldn’t do to
wake her before morning.

Gusman Kreiger led Jasper back up the fire escape. “That was
the hard part. Now I just need you to clean up in here, and you can go back to
bed.”

Jasper nodded as Kreiger knew he would. Jasper was a good
boy.

“Take that bucket and finish where I left off. Clean the
floor with the paper towels and polish the wood with the spray cleaner. Clean
up every drop, and leave the windows open so the place will air out. When you
finish, take the bucket and the dirty rags down the fire escape to the Dumpster,
and throw them in. If there’s any blood on the pavement, dump the wash water on
it before you discard the bucket. Put the spray cleaner back under the sink and
close Miss Monroe’s door before you leave. But don’t lock it; she doesn’t have
her key.”

Jasper nodded emptily, and Kreiger worried he might have said
too much, gone too fast. He gently touched the center of Jasper’s forehead with
his index finger. “
Do you understand, Jubjub Bird
?”

This time, the boy nodded. Like with the flyer, he didn’t understand
what he was doing, but he knew exactly
what
to do. And when he was done
cleaning, he would go straight to bed, closing the door behind him—but not
locking it.

A good little Jubjub Bird.

“I’d stay and help,” Kreiger said, “but I have some things to
take care of. And besides that, I don’t want to.”

Then the sorcerer turned and left out the open window to
become lost in the darkness.

Nothing else to do, Jasper began sponging blood from the middle
of Ellen Monroe’s living room floor.

The dream would not let
him sleep.

Every time Lucas closed
his eyes, it was the same. The dream came out of the darkness, and there was
nothing he could do to stop it. He was standing over a scarecrow that was
splayed out on the ground, limbs tied to the ends of a cross. And Lucas was
beating the scarecrow. He was smashing the scarecrow’s rag-face, fists punching
through until they hit the wooden beam behind, breaking his fingers, shredding
his skin. But still he could not stop. He did not know why. And sometimes the
scarecrow was not a scarecrow at all, and sometimes the cloth face was not
cloth. Sometimes it was a man pinned to the beam, and Lucas was breaking his
hands against the man’s face, splitting his skin upon the broken edges of
teeth. Sometimes.

But he still did not know
why.

And he was screaming,
every time screaming:
You aren’t supposed to be here!

And he did not know why.

And then Lucas woke up.

Something had gone
terribly wrong. He couldn’t put a finger on it—wasn’t even sure what it might
be, or where to begin looking—but it was there, the distinct sense that every
moment of this day from beginning to end was crying out in tongues his soul
could not ignore, but which his mind was not equipped to understand.

Before tonight, he’d
allowed himself to forget he even had a soul.

This far down, this far
gone, you reached for any offer of relief or escape. It didn’t matter
what—smoked from a pipe, injected in a vein, needle reused but not yet rusting,
drunk from bottles discreetly wrapped in brown paper—the premise, like the
results, was always the same. Relief or escape, neither made you richer, or
warmed you against the cold, or assuaged your hunger. You were still shit, what
the world stepped in then tried to scrape from the bottom of its shoe.

And God lurked down there
at the bottom, too, that low rung that was easy to reach and offered similar
promises. The holy sisters brayed on about it while they watched to make sure
you ate only your share, and didn’t stash anything away for later. The price
for a meal was an hour spent listening to the mission volunteers urging you to
renounce Satan and the sins he had brought you to; the only true way lay
through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Amen. If you got stuck down long
enough, messages echoed, repeated, trapped in a rut that defied time, the
concentric circles of Hell trapping the damned forever. He sat through a dozen
harangues on sloth by rotating priests too lazy to write new material, passing
off last February’s sermon as new, the promise of salvation and peace in
exchange for unquestioning devotion.

Chains are chains.
Willing or no, a slave is still a slave.

Whether you screamed for
salvation from a church pew, or screamed for your connection on the afternoon
he was late when you needed a fix, you still screamed. The Lord might promise
forgiveness, He might not ulcerate your liver or leave you blind or choking on
a throat full of blood in a back alley someplace, but neither did He make you
any richer, make you any less hungry, make you anything more than scraped-off
shit. No, God made no promises save that if you served Him faithfully all your
days, He would grant eventual peace.

Or drink a fifth of gin,
and your mind would know that same peace for a time. It was all temporary;
nothing was meant to last. Getting stoned didn’t last. God didn’t last. His
followers claimed otherwise, but two thousand years later, they were still
waiting.

After half a lifetime
spent in sin of one form or another, forsaking God’s gift of life through
self-abuse or the indulgence of self-pity and occasions of arrogance, Lucas
Bertram had not suffered unduly. God had not warned him away from his
wickedness with threats of hell, not in this life or the next, nor promised him
a life any better than what he had for following Him, not in this life or the
next. The clergy talked about it in vagaries, but refused to be held
accountable, like used-car salesmen or mortgage brokers. It was all empty
promises, and for some, that was enough.

Lucas held them in disdain.
Belief for the sake of comfort was not true belief, not true faith. You reach
out in desperation, and your hand grabs a crucifix instead of a bottle of pills;
fate alone decides which is within reach.

Lucas spent his youth in
God’s service, faithfully reading the Bible, attending Sunday school and church
and youth meetings. For all the good it had done. He was still abandoned. After
a time, he began to wonder if perhaps there was never anyone listening there at
all. Perhaps he had simply been mistaken, and it had taken this forced-fast of street
living, of starving for food and huddling over steam vents for warmth to
enlighten him.

There was no God, and it
was folly to pray for salvation, or eagerly await his return. One could hardly
return when one had never been.

And somewhere in the
midst of all that time and bitter space, Lucas lost his soul. Or perhaps he had
simply discarded it like an old rabbit’s foot saved over from childhood. Maybe
he was better rid of it, his soul a bad penny, and God a stray cat that only
seemed to come around to cause trouble.

But that day his soul had
found its way home. And it was trying to hear the warning, tell him what it
was, and why he should be afraid.

Cho and Marco were
missing.

So was the Goose Man.

Lucas followed the drag
marks in the dirt to the shade of a rotting fender, found the impression on the
ground, blood dried into the dusty earth, brown and small like rat turds. But
there was no sign of Goose Man. They’d beaten him nearly to death; Lucas still
wasn’t sure why. He didn’t remember now what made him think that Goose Man was evil,
an abomination to be destroyed, but there was something in Goose Man that said
he was wrong to be here, wrong to be in this junkyard, this city, this
world
.
Lucas could not put a finger on it. It was simply something he felt in his
newly rediscovered soul.

As for Matty and Marco,
Lucas thought he knew. All morning, Cho wouldn’t shut up about the bookshop
girl; the one Goose Man stalked day and night up until today when he and the
other three beat the hell out of him. Now Cho was obsessed, and had imposed on
Marco’s loyalty and retarded commonsense to accompany him. And that troubled
him. He liked the bookshop girl; liked her the way you liked people you didn’t
personally know, but thought you knew from a distance, impersonal glimpses and
stolen moments. She wore the stare of a perpetual dreamer, her mind always
somewhere else, never here. He liked that faraway, dreaming look, her
fearlessness with walking the streets alone in the evening. She was an
innocent, a unicorn trapped in a world that no longer believed. Lucas could
appreciate that. And maybe he could even appreciate a certain degree of
obsession. From Matty. From the Goose Man.

But no good would come
from it. Goose Man should be dead. Instead, he was missing. He had not shuffled
off, dragging a trail of coughed-up blood like an animal hiding itself away to
die. He had simply, if miraculously, gotten better and left, presumably returning
to his obsession of stalking the girl from the bookstore.

The same girl Cho and
Marco were now stalking.

And what do you think
will happen when they cross paths, hmm, teacher?

The question taunted him,
but he had no answer. It was late and he couldn’t sleep for dreams, and his
soul was trying to tell him something he was too ignorant or obstinate to hear.

Maybe God abandoned you
for twenty years just so that when you thought you really needed Him, and you
were ready to believe again, He could turn away from you as you did from Him,
challenge your absence, torment your faithlessness?

Lucas didn’t think that
was so. At least, h
h
e hoped not.

Why? He told you to
believe, and you didn’t. He told you to obey, and you refused. He asked simply
for faith, and you doubted. Now you feel alone and afraid and you want God like
a child wants his blanket when the thunder rumbles in the night sky. Why should
He return? What have you done for Him lately?

Lucas went in search of Johnny.
Lucas could always talk to Johnny; Johnny would understand. And if he didn’t,
he might at least have a little something stashed away to help forget things
that were too hard to comprehend. Lucas didn’t need much, just enough to dim
the voices, deafen him to the strange sounds of what might be his soul, numb
him to the possibility that he might have been wrong all along: about Goose
Man, God, the girl from the bookstore, and everything else you could name. Just
a little bit was all he needed to make it go away, to bring on the welcome
sheets of gray, the mental cloudscape, the passive drifting apart of the brain.

Anything to make the
dreams stop. To just sleep. A little bit of what Johnny kept for a rainy day
might make that happen.

“Johnny?” he called
across the dead space of the boneyard.

The once-stockbroker and
day trader lived in a hut of cardboard and crates near a sectioned oil drum the
four kept a small fire in, huddled like night watchmen in a distant and
forgotten outpost on the edge of the kingdom, the edge of reality. Johnny did
most of the feeding, keeper of the flame in a graveyard of dead ends and
derelicts abandoned for parts.

“Hey, Johnny?” Lucas
called again, his voice like an old man: a little senile, a little afraid—maybe
of the dark, maybe of something concealed in it—a little too close to dying and
starting to worry.

Johnny usually perched on
an old tire rim, feeding boards and newspaper logs and whatnot to the fire
. But instead of Johnny’s hunched frame,
Lucas saw only the soles of Johnny’s shoes propped up on the edge of the drum,
the rest hidden in darkness.
Sampled some of his stash and passed out
probably, the fire forgotten as easily as the day.

Johnny snores when he’s
passed out, teacher, and Johnny’s not snoring.

“Johnny, wake up man.”

And if he’s so fucked
up that he passed out and fell over, what did he get fucked up on, teacher?
There’s no bottle. No latent smell of smoke. No empty needle dropped carelessly
in the dirt. There’s nothing. Just Johnny flat on his back like a dead man,
taking a nap in the dirt; a dirt nap, teacher.

“Johnny, it’s Lucas,” he
called, hating the desperation in his voice. “Get up, man. We need ta talk.”

Nothing. Nothing except
for the smell buried beneath the stench of trash and the smoke of burning
garbage
: urine, like
Johnny got lazy and took a piss in the fire before getting so stoned, he passed
out. Or worse, Johnny had gotten stoned too fast, and pissed himself.

Johnny’s not stoned,
Lucas, and he’s not asleep either; you know that. Johnny snores like a buzz saw
when he sleeps. And Johnny shares with you when he’s managed to find anything,
no matter what it is. He won’t always share with Marco, and never with Cho, but
he always shares with you. He doesn’t fall asleep tending the fire, and he
never sleeps through someone calling his name. It’s hardwired into his nervous
system, bound up tighter than a watch. Bull markets and basis points might have
left him behind years ago, but Johnny still twitches at every sound like a
broker at the bell, a slave to his alarm clock and pager and telephone and
every noise that seems to matter but really doesn’t. Because nothing really
does matter, does it? Not really. Nothing matters and nothing ever did; only
you never knew that until you lost it all and found yourself down here. But
Johnny still wakes up when he hears a noise; wakes up like a man afraid of
being late for work. And if Johnny’s not asleep, then what do you think he’s
doing lying there …

The thought died away
unfinished, Lucas refusing to give it the satisfaction, to let it win the
argument that he was very much afraid was already over before it even began.
“Johnny?”

Lucas rounded the oil
drum and looked down, his worst fears already come to pass.

Johnny was dead.

Not dead like they
expected to go—from the cold, or pneumonia, or heart or liver failure. These
were the ways Lucas and Johnny expected to go—
but not too soon! Please God,
not too soon
! But this was different. One more thing that was so very, very
wrong about this day, this unending day.

A deep, gory wound punched
clean through the middle of Johnny’s chest. Not a gunshot wound; he’d have
heard that. Someone had killed Johnny in silence, butchered him like an animal with
something as thick as a spear.

And whatever sick monster
murdered him had also torn his eyes from their sockets. No final expression for
Johnny: not peace or fear or despair or revelation, only slack emptiness. No
enlightenment as he lay in the dust of his beggar’s deathbed, only death.

Why should you hope
for anything more, Lucas?

“John?” A useless
petition upon deaf ears. Lucas scanned about in the litter and dirt, wondering
where Johnny’s killer had discarded his eyes. He didn’t see them, and knew he
wasn’t really looking for them anyway. He was simply looking away.